Ostman:More countries are restricting internet freedoms to stifle criticism flailing around desperately, trying to swim against the tide.

/Good luck trying to control every aspect of the internet forever, Pakistan.

I wouldn't downplay it entirely.Businesses like Google are in the game to make money, and there is money to be made in censoring things for governments. Big companies have the funds to invest in "solving" big problems, like an unregulated net.

/They probably don't care about a handful of darknet operators ripping off movies./Its about keeping the mainstream from going all "Arab Spring" on their government.

dittybopper:FTFA:Estonia has a highly developed online culture that includes online voting and access to electronic medical records and some of the lightest content restrictions in the world, the report found.

Yeah, I don't know if those first two I bolded are necessarily good things. I'm all for the third, though.

Ease of access to medical records is a benefit to getting fast and accurate treatment.More doctors sharing knowledge is a good thing, especially when cooperating on dosing the same patient.

/Having your data get out to the general public would be a bad thing tho./More regular access to the democratic process can also be a good/bad thing depending on how its secured./I think the more secure the internet, the more useful it becomes./Flip side is that a secure internet also makes it prone to government/corporate abuse.

way south:dittybopper: FTFA:Estonia has a highly developed online culture that includes online voting and access to electronic medical records and some of the lightest content restrictions in the world, the report found.

Yeah, I don't know if those first two I bolded are necessarily good things. I'm all for the third, though.

Ease of access to medical records is a benefit to getting fast and accurate treatment.More doctors sharing knowledge is a good thing, especially when cooperating on dosing the same patient.

/Having your data get out to the general public would be a bad thing tho.

Data wants to be free. The more places that information ends up, the more likely it is to leak. My doctors office uses laptops connected by wireless to their main patient database. I can see that network from the parking lot of the business across the street. How secure is their network? As far as I know, they don't have a dedicated IT person on staff. How secure will their network be 2 years from now? There are benefits to a computerized patient management system, but there are also risks./More regular access to the democratic process can also be a good/bad thing depending on how its secured.

Do you trust what is essentially a black box? I don't, and I write software for a living. Something as important as voting should be a manual, paper process. There is little to be gained in terms of speed by making the recording of votes purely electronic, and having a physical, paper ballot that can be stored and recounted manually, in front of witnesses, if necessary.

It's much harder to cheat when you have paper ballots than it is to just insert some line of code that randomly flips enough votes to assure a victory, assuming equal access to both, or to have someone have multiple registrations vote.

I also think it's a damned good idea to require photo ID when voting, provided it's free for the asking so you don't disenfranchise the poor.

/I think the more secure the internet, the more useful it becomes./Flip side is that a secure internet also makes it prone to government/corporate abuse.

dittybopper:There is little to be gained in terms of speed by making the recording of votes purely electronic, and having a physical, paper ballot that can be stored and recounted manually, in front of witnesses, if necessary

, is an important safeguard against election fraud.

FTFM.

To further extend, I don't have a problem with electronic *COUNTING* of votes, just electronic recording of them. Running a stack of paper ballots through a machine that counts them is fine, so long as you retain those ballots for some period of time afterwards for machine and manual recounting.

dittybopper:way south: dittybopper: FTFA:Estonia has a highly developed online culture that includes online voting and access to electronic medical records and some of the lightest content restrictions in the world, the report found.

Yeah, I don't know if those first two I bolded are necessarily good things. I'm all for the third, though.

Ease of access to medical records is a benefit to getting fast and accurate treatment.More doctors sharing knowledge is a good thing, especially when cooperating on dosing the same patient.

/Having your data get out to the general public would be a bad thing tho.

Data wants to be free. The more places that information ends up, the more likely it is to leak. My doctors office uses laptops connected by wireless to their main patient database. I can see that network from the parking lot of the business across the street. How secure is their network? As far as I know, they don't have a dedicated IT person on staff. How secure will their network be 2 years from now? There are benefits to a computerized patient management system, but there are also risks.

/More regular access to the democratic process can also be a good/bad thing depending on how its secured.

Do you trust what is essentially a black box? I don't, and I write software for a living. Something as important as voting should be a manual, paper process. There is little to be gained in terms of speed by making the recording of votes purely electronic, and having a physical, paper ballot that can be stored and recounted manually, in front of witnesses, if necessary.

It's much harder to cheat when you have paper ballots than it is to just insert some line of code that randomly flips enough votes to assure a victory, assuming equal access to both, or to have someone have multiple registrations vote.

I also think it's a damned good idea to require photo ID when voting, provided it's free for the asking so you don't disenfranchise the poor.

/I think the more secure the in ...

Having some trust in the system is already a critical part of living in a society.Do we personally count the paper ballots?Can we trust the people doing so are more than just actors, paid to put on a convincing charade?The paper system is easily abused and, as the meaning of participatory government evolves, will become unwieldy.I think we already live in a blackbox controlled society and the only countermeasures are open communication and a healthy dose of citizen sponsored oversight.It's the only way we'll know our votes have meaning, or if its time to grab our rifles.

To that end We need to know the network is secure and that the code in our programs won't be hiding any ugly secrets. We need to protect our freedom to share information. We have to put those who manipulate our Internet access under the microscope.Living off the grid is no longer an option if we want to keep expanding.

I have no idea exacly how we will move forward, but we better put some thought into it.

way south:Do we personally count the paper ballots?Can we trust the people doing so are more than just actors, paid to put on a convincing charade?

Because they are counted in public and observed by representatives of all interested parties. Those observers are generally locals, who all know each other, though they may be from different political parties.

With electronic recording and counting, you have to trust what the machine says. Maybe it's 100% clean, but other than the say-so of someone hundreds or thousands of miles away, how would you know?

I actually think a hybrid system is best: A pure paper ballot that is machine counted and then stored for possible manual recounts, and to test the system by doing random manual recounts of a sampling of machines to see if they agree.

So say you have 20 voting machines in a district, before you certify the electronically counted results you pull all the ballots run through one of the machines that is randomly selected, and manually count them. If you spend 5 or 10 seconds on each ballot, it would only take about an hour to manually count 500 ballots, assuming you didn't split them up and count them in parallel.

If the count is off by a significant amount, you have manually count the *ALL* the ballots before you can certify the results, something that would be impossible in a purely electronic version.

This would actually keep the voting machine manufacturers and those running/servicing/setting them up honest, because the chances of them getting caught trying to 'cook the books' are good.

dittybopper:way south: Do we personally count the paper ballots?Can we trust the people doing so are more than just actors, paid to put on a convincing charade?

Because they are counted in public and observed by representatives of all interested parties. Those observers are generally locals, who all know each other, though they may be from different political parties.

With electronic recording and counting, you have to trust what the machine says. Maybe it's 100% clean, but other than the say-so of someone hundreds or thousands of miles away, how would you know?

I actually think a hybrid system is best: A pure paper ballot that is machine counted and then stored for possible manual recounts, and to test the system by doing random manual recounts of a sampling of machines to see if they agree.

So say you have 20 voting machines in a district, before you certify the electronically counted results you pull all the ballots run through one of the machines that is randomly selected, and manually count them. If you spend 5 or 10 seconds on each ballot, it would only take about an hour to manually count 500 ballots, assuming you didn't split them up and count them in parallel.

If the count is off by a significant amount, you have manually count the *ALL* the ballots before you can certify the results, something that would be impossible in a purely electronic version.

This would actually keep the voting machine manufacturers and those running/servicing/setting them up honest, because the chances of them getting caught trying to 'cook the books' are good.

Something like this would work for the current system, but I've got my mind fixed on the long term.

You could get similar redundancy to paper by using multiple servers from different vendors. The vote program sends a signal across the internet and you get an electronic "receipt" from each server that registers your vote. If there is a mismatch (between servers), a third party can poll the voting terminals (your cell phone or PC) again for verification.Instant and anonymous, with each company determined to not screw up or be hacked if they want to maintain their contract.

...Its only an offhand thought that maybe a networking guy will shoot down, but Point is: How easily we can access the voting booth may redefine how government works.

A futurist might say that, in the coming decades, the definition of a nation is going to change from "the place where you're physically located" to "those servers where your electronic paperwork is filed". How you vote, how often you vote, and what issues you can vote for are all things susceptible to change IF the system can remain secure.

dittybopper:way south: Something like this would work for the current system, but I've got my mind fixed on the long term.

So do I. Can you adequately predict the future? No? Me neither. That's why a system that can be verified manually by eyeballing hardcopy ballots is a good idea.

Again, I write software for a living. Perhaps that is why I'm skeptical of totally electronic voting.

I started fixing computers in the mid 90's. My first boss said we'd soon see the age of the paperless office.These days I fix copiers and printers. So I can safely say that age isn't coming anytime soon.

I still believe tho.

/We trust software to run our stock markets and transportation networks./It might be a conceptual or generational thing, but I think its bound to happen.

way south:dittybopper: way south: Something like this would work for the current system, but I've got my mind fixed on the long term.

So do I. Can you adequately predict the future? No? Me neither. That's why a system that can be verified manually by eyeballing hardcopy ballots is a good idea.

Again, I write software for a living. Perhaps that is why I'm skeptical of totally electronic voting.

I started fixing computers in the mid 90's. My first boss said we'd soon see the age of the paperless office.These days I fix copiers and printers. So I can safely say that age isn't coming anytime soon.

I still believe tho.

/We trust software to run our stock markets and transportation networks./It might be a conceptual or generational thing, but I think its bound to happen.

I started futzing with computers back in the early 1980s. Before I actually had consistent access to a computer, I used to manually (!) run the programs in these two books:

by hand using pen, paper, and a calculator.

I was an early adopter and computer enthusiast, and again, I write software for a living. I have 4 working machines at home, and 3 on my desk at work. I have a working '286 laptop with Minix on it, just because Windows wasn't geeky enough for me when I got it*. For about 2 decades, I didn't buy a new computer because I could always build or upgrade cast-offs from friends, family, and work. I was sending e-mails over Fight-0-Net and posting to bulletin boards back in the 1980s at 300 baud. I do a wide range of stuff from web programming to supporting COBOL**. Hell, I bank electronically, and pay bills that way. I order stuff off the intarwebz.

In short, I'm not a luddite.

I am, however, a big proponent of paper ballots, simply because something as important as voting shouldn't be an exercise in trust of a black box. Too much is at stake.

*Now I can't part with it, because it's the same model laptop that was used for the sentry gun controllers in the movie Aliens, except it has the monochrome LCD instead of plasma display. **And by "supporting", I mostly mean re-writing it in more modern and less wordy languages, though sometimes it's quicker just to modify the existing code and save the conversion for another day.

I am, however, a big proponent of paper ballots, simply because something as important as voting shouldn't be an exercise in trust of a black box. Too much is at stake.

I'm not accusing you of being a luddite. I'm accusing you of having old fashioned values.

The question is if paper really gives us the redundancy that's needed, and then to wager that against the gains from a less "bolted to the floor" system. One that doesn't need a polling station but could deliver the same results. One that can resolve with a higher turnout by being more accessible.

I think that, in the US, voter fraud has been less of a problem than unbalanced turnout by select groups of voters. Easier access eliminates that issue.Fraud existed in the days of pure paper and, where it still exists, is unlikely to go away just because a machine printed the ballot.

Securing the electronic ballot box is a software engineers problem, and he's got to solve it for banking and medical records anyway. It shouldn't be much different for votes.

/If all else fails, there's still the second amendment./I doubt stolen elections will go unnoticed for very long.